Flood hazards affect not only the social environment but have a severe impact on the floodplain/riparian ecosystems. This reduces access to ecosystem potential services and degrades the watershed components leaving. This havoc increases the havoc caused by climate change and creates more management and ecological sustainability challenges. It affects natural functions and forces the need for other artificial strategies such as the introduction of other species to replace lost native species and degraded eco-zones and the Conagree River Watershed in South Carolina is not an exception. The flood susceptibility of the Congaree River Watershed (CRW) was carried out using the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Model (FAHM). The model utilized fifteen (15) flood contributing indicators with 315 current and former flooding points in the CRW. Furthermore, three ecological indicators namely, Land Use intensity (LUI), Riparian Vegetation Departure (RVD), and Flood Connectivity (FC)were derived from Big Spatial data and other auxiliary datasets and were integrated into a developed Fuzzy Inference Network Model (FISM) for Riparian Condition Assessment (RCA) of CRW.
Results/Conclusions
The CRW revealed that the upper portions are more susceptible to flooding. The upper portion of CRW which houses developed areas, agriculture, and rock outcrop experiences more rainfall and is still susceptible to flooding than the lower downstream where the Congaree National Park (CNP) is located. This implies that the CNP has a more functional river flow and could be a positive contributor to reducing the highly damaging effect of flood occurrences from upstream. The RCA result revealed at the same upper portion of the Watershed agrees with the flood vulnerability as this portion revealed mainly poor and moderate conditions. The RVD result revealed a degrading condition which is attributed to the loss of native species to invasive/introduced species. Areas of the riparian areas that revealed intact and good conditions are found downstream of the watershed and these are the zones where the CNP is located. The reduced ecological disturbances in the zones are a possibility for this revealed information. However, few areas revealed high flood vulnerability and have a good riparian condition possibly caused by the impacts from dams’ reconstruction, ongoing riparian regeneration. This approach considered in this work will contribute to riparian restoration and flood management.
